When Yuri Kuzmin gets a call that someone is stuck in an elevator in the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments, one of Stalin’s “Seven Sisters,” the wedding-cake-shaped buildings that punctuate the Moscow skyline, the first thing that the longtime onsite mechanic does is curse. Then, he grabs his toolbox and heads to the building’s thirty-second floor. There, in the machinery room. he checks the nineteen-eighties’s era “brain” of the elevator, a bank of electronics initially designed to raise and lower rockets being stored underground. If he can, Kuzmin will release the stuck passengers from there. If he can’t, he has to go down and do it manually. Does he receive thanks? “From time to time,” he said. “People are different. Sometimes, they are not happy. Some are inebriated. But it is always pleasant to help a good person.”
Moscow has a lot of elevators—upward of a hundred and twenty thousand, which is more than twice as many as New York City. Many are old—every fifth elevator in the Russian capital has exceeded its lifespan. And a lot of people get stuck in them—depending on whom you ask, anywhere from an estimated hundred and twenty thousand to more than two hundred thousand people get stuck in a Moscow elevator each year. (In Chicago, which has a just under a quarter as many lifts as Moscow, the number of yearly entrapment incidents reported to the city is closer to a hundred).
That’s why teams of specially-trained elevator rescue mechanics roam the city day and night, freeing people. “We are like Batman,” said Evgeniy Titarenko, general director of Moslift, on a recent morning. “If anything happens, we come and save you.” During the Soviet era, state-owned Moslift oversaw every elevator in Moscow. In 1992, Moscow’s government decided to take part of Moslift and create a joint company with the American company Otis. Today, Moslift is still in charge of about half the elevators in Moscow, while MOS Otis is responsible for just under half. (Some two hundred and fifty small, largely unregulated companies handle the city’s remaining lifts).
“You are lucky if you get stuck in our elevator,” said Titarenko, a jovial, energetic man who smelled like cigarettes. The Moslift director then gestured around the “Situation Room,” where a wall of modern screens offered a contrast to the rest of the building’s brown-toned Soviet décor. Three dispatchers sat at their desks taking calls as data blinked from the screens. An address popped up, highlighted in red: someone had just gotten trapped. Every elevator in Moscow is supposed to be equipped with a button to connect passengers with the responsible company’s dispatchers. These buttons don’t always work, so these days people use their cell phones. Calling Moslift, said Titarenko, is still the default for many a Muscovite. “If it is not our elevator, we try to transfer the call,” he said. “But we are helping everyone.”
There is more to the art of elevator rescue than just sending a team out. “We work with the whole person,” explained Valentine Kazakova, who has been a Moslift dispatcher for ten years. “The most important thing is to use a kind voice. Then, we help so that he won’t be nervous. We call to his relatives, we can call to his job. So we work with him personally. Meanwhile, the rescue team is coming.” The goal is to get people out within thirty minutes, and both Moslift and MOS Otis say they regularly achieve this, rendering the Muscovite elevator-entrapment experience more of a workaday inconvenience than a newsworthy event.
Indeed, some see getting stuck in the elevator as a blessing in disguise. In the late nineteen-eighties, the Russian rock band Chaif was stuck in a hotel elevator with the Russian rock band Kino. As it happened, the musicians were in possession of some “flaming water,” or vodka, so the experience was a cheerful one, and the incident inspired a line in the 1996 song, “Rock’n’roll Tonight”: “Yesterday I was stuck in an elevator for the first time / It was a great opportunity to talk with myself.”
“We have an opportunity for frankly speaking with [ourselves] very rarely,” wrote Vladimir Shakhrin, Chaif’s lead singer, in an e-mail. “But when you [are] stuck in an elevator, you get a wonderful chance to talk and listen [to] yourself. And maybe this chance is the only one, for many people.”
Both Moslift and MOS Otis say that serious elevator accidents and injuries are rare in the Russian capital. And, if a hazardous situation does come up, it can be a bonus to have so many mechanics on hand. Two months ago, for example, Victor Ermolaev, a foreman who has worked for Moslift since 1979, averted a tragedy. We met on a rainy afternoon in the south of the city. He maneuvered through traffic, turned down a side street, and pulled up to a fourteen-story prefab building indistinguishable from its neighbors. “This is where the fire was,” he said, peering up through the windshield. “This was the door we used.”
Ermolaev was in his office, just a few streets over, when he got the call: a man and a woman were trapped in a lift in a building that was on fire. While Moslift has fifteen hundred rescue mechanics on call everyday, if a line mechanic is closer, they’ll send him instead. The elevator had stopped near the fourth floor when the electricity went out. “I am the most senior, so I went,” said Ermolaev. The fire department was there, but he was able to open the doors more quickly than they could have. “It was a matter of minutes,” he said. “They could have broken down the doors, but they would have saved two corpses.” As it was, the mechanic was able to jump down into the lift and, despite the fumes, pass first the unconscious woman, and then the unconscious man up to the firefighters. Both lived. “That was the first time in my career,” he said, “but I just did what any person would do.”
Over at Otis, in the eastern part of the city, the only thing Soviet about the office is the view: beyond the plate-glass windows rise a crop of tall, gray residential blocks. While the major building boom in prefab residential construction began in the nineteen-fifties, much of the housing stock was limited to five-stories to avoid the need for elevators, according to Richard Anderson of Columbia University. Around the mid-nineteen-sixties that changed. Under Brezhnev, taller buildings requiring extensive use of elevators went up to address the city’s housing shortage; the largest segment of Moscow’s elevators are located in these buildings.
“Russia has a very well-developed elevator market,” said Vardan Avakyan, director of the Otis Eastern Europe Group. “You forget, but the U.S.S.R. was a very well-developed country. We launched a spaceman in 1961.” Otis, the world’s largest elevator company, brought the first elevators to Russia: in 1893, Czar Alexander III ordered several for the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. “You know the Russian Czars were basically German,” said Avakyan. “So they probably had engineering somehow in their background.”
With the revolution, Otis’ expansion into Russia came to a halt. In 1991, Vladimir Putin, then working in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, signed the papers to build an Otis factory in St. Petersburg. (A photo on the wall, with a longer-haired, younger-looking Putin attests to this event.) Otis’s Russian-made elevators, like the “Neva,” compete with those of Soviet manufacturers whose factories sometimes still use machinery expropriated from Germany after the Second World War.
MOS Otis’s rescue center is not so different from Moslift’s—except for the giant plastic map of Russia on the back wall, scattered with little star-shaped lights. “Our plan is to have control of all Russia from this place,” said Alexander Danilov, marketing director at Otis Eastern Europe Group, gesturing at the cities lit up on the map. “Every Otis elevator, from Tver to Vladimir, from this room.” Modern elevator technology makes this a possibility: like cars, elevators are increasingly driven by sophisticated electronics. Elevators can often be repaired remotely, with no need for a mechanic’s visit. The MOS Otis dispatchers, a group of sturdy women with no-nonsense hairdos wearing identical blue uniforms, have gotten entrapment calls down to under a minute. “When we started, they were taking two to three minutes,” said Vadim Yudin, a service operations manager. “People always want to tell the whole story. But all we really need is the address, and the condition of the entrance.”
Last year, Moscow’s new mayor launched a program to replace the city’s oldest elevators. But it’s still not hard to find people who have been stuck in an elevator: on a stroll down Old Arbat street on a holiday, it took twenty minutes to talk to three people who had been trapped. Both Diana and Ilan got stuck as children, in the nineties, when the Brezhnev-era elevators reached the end of their lifespan; to this day, Diana tries to take the stairs whenever she can. Ilya, an engineer, was trapped more recently, in the building in the Moscow suburbs where he lives on the eighth floor. “My wife and I had just come back from the supermarket, and we had all the goods with us,” said the young man. “I used the button, and the guy was really nice.” Rescuers came within half an hour, he said. “In the end, it was a romantic twenty minutes with my wife.”
Maxim, an economics student who grew up in a first-floor apartment, always takes the stairs. He has never been trapped, but two friends were. “It was New Year’s Eve, and it was very unpleasant—they had to wait two hours.” New Year’s Eve, as any elevator dispatcher will tell you, is a particularly busy night in the festive Russian capital. “People sometimes decide they want to jump up and down,” explained Otis’ Yudin, with a wry, slightly pained look. “They are looking for adventures.” Still, come what may, the dispatchers are there: “There was one guy, he was trapped and it was taking a while,” said Yudin. “Of course he had a bottle of champagne, because he was going up to his friend’s house. So at midnight, one of our dispatchers toasted with him over the intercom. They met the New Year together.”
Standing next to his white rescue car, a Lada, Aleksey Zotov, a MOS Otis rescue mechanic, had just finished his regularly scheduled maintenance work in one of the eastern residential districts for which he is responsible and was now officially on call until the following morning. Tall and friendly, Zotov said he makes two to three rescues a week. “They’re usually grateful,” he said, of the people he frees. In eleven years and too many rescues to count, he said he has never seen anyone crying. His most memorable rescue took place a few years ago. “It was a bride, and she got stuck in the elevator without her future husband,” recounted Zotov, as the afternoon drew to a close. “When I rescued her, she was so happy she invited me to come along with them to the wedding.”
Did he go? The mechanic shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was working.”
Read Nick Paumgarten’s 2008 Profile of a man who was trapped in an elevator for forty-one hours. You can also watch a video about the story.
Illustration by Maximilian Bode.
